Keeping an Eye on Central America
NASA-supported researchers have developed software anyone can use to fly, video game-style, over Central America and survey its current environmental conditions.

Flying over the lush, mountainous landscape of Central America, a local environmental official points out plumes of smoke where "slash and burn" agriculture is destroying hundreds of acres of rain forest. In the distance, dark-tinted waters of a red tide nearing coastal fishing villages are clearly visible from this altitude. He points to a silt-filled river snaking through the forest below -- a symptom of soil erosion caused by unsustainable farming practices upstream, he explains.

The view evokes a kind of intuitive understanding of these environmental concerns that words alone can not provide.

Juan Mario Dary, the environmental minister of Guatemala, plans to give such an aerial tour of Central America this weekend. Only he won't actually be in a plane. In fact, he won't be anywhere near Central America. He'll be in Tokyo, Japan.

The tour Dary plans to give will be a virtual flight over a computer-generated, 3-dimensional landscape -- something like a "flight simulator" video game. The view through the window, though, is reality. It's based on real satellite and geographic data, offering a "big picture" view of how humans are affecting the rich diversity of wildlife in the region.

"In some ways, it's better than the real thing," says Daniel Irwin, a research scientist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "The user can choose which 'layers' of the data they want to see, some of which aren't obvious from a real plane: conservation park boundaries, small village locations, ecosystem types, and endangered species habitats, just to name a few."

This virtual landscape software is one of many new tools that Irwin and others are developing as part of an international project called SIAM-SERVIR, an acronym in Spanish meaning "Mesoamerican System of Environmental Information -- Regional System of Monitoring and Visualization."

Through a coordinated effort between the seven countries of Central America, NASA, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and others, SIAM-SERVIR is creating an easy-to-use Web portal to environmental data for the entire region. The portal is online now, though it is still incomplete. The importance of having daily wildfire data available during the spring fire season convinced them to pre-release the site, Irwin says. It will be finished later this year.

Anything that can be plotted on a map can be integrated into the master database: historic geographic records, modern road maps, satellite spectral data from Landsat and MODIS (MODerate-resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer), or wildlife habitat data from traditional fieldwork. Irwin, Guillen and colleagues hope that all this information, freely available and easy to understand, will help Central Americans make better decisions about the region's beleaguered natural resources.

In July, construction will begin on a central data storage facility in Panama. In addition to being the information warehouse for the project, the Panama facility will be a kind of "situation room" -- a "mission control" for monitoring the health and condition of rain forests, croplands, rivers, and coastal waters throughout Central America. USAID is funding the development of this facility, as well as six smaller facilities in each of the other Central American countries: Belize, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. These smaller national centers will be staffed by experts with direct access to the central database for helping address the environmental issues in their own countries.

Central America is a region with a great richness and diversity of tropical wildlife: though it only constitutes roughly 1% of the planet's surface, the region is home to about 7% of all land-dwelling species. The region is also home to a rapidly growing and widely impoverished human population. Serving the needs of the people without bankrupting the natural resources on which they depend is an enormous challenge to political decision makers.

It was local decision makers who came up with the idea for this Web-portal project, explains Irwin. The impetus came from an intergovernmental organization called CCAD (a Spanish acronym meaning "Central American Commission of Environment and Development"), which combines and coordinates the efforts of the seven Central American countries' ministries of the environment. Regional treaties charge the CCAD with the task of promoting environmental protection and sustainable development throughout the region. This new Web portal is one tool they sought to help them in their work.

"We're not telling the Central Americans what needs to be done," says Irwin. "Rather we're trying to listen and develop products and tools based on their needs. It is a demand-driven process."

Once development of the system is finished and local experts have been sufficiently trained, control and operation of the system will be turned over to the local environmental authorities, though NASA will remain available to them for technical support.

Meanwhile, anyone with an Internet connection can visit. At you can see plumes from fires and watch rain clouds drift by. Eventually, when the site is complete, you can hop aboard a virtual plane and fly up and down the long Central American coast--just like a high-level environmental minister. As Irwin says, in some ways, it's better than the real thing.